Category Archives: Navel-gazing

| In the news, Montreal, Navel-gazing

Kurtis Hansen: Hero

One year ago, a fire up in a far-away cabin near a lake caught fire, killing five out of the six people staying there. One of the victims was Kurtis Hansen, a 26-year-old former security guard at The Gazette, whose rather nasty smoking habit had him often conversing with editorial staff late at night in the smoking room. (Last night it became clear that, for the most part, smokers had a closer relationship with him than non-smokers)

Today, the paper carries a full-page feature on the fire and its aftermath, which as written by Katherine Wilton is so dramatic as to be almost surreal. It focuses on Karl Hansen, who barely survived the fire that took the lives of the five people he brought with him to the cottage.

It also says what Kurtis was doing for the last few minutes of his life:

Kurtis Hansen raced around the one-storey cottage looking for an escape route. They quickly decided the best option was to go through a window in a bedroom.

In a desperate bid to save his family, Kurtis grabbed a small end table and hammered it against the window until it broke. But inhaling the thick black smoke was too much for him. He fell to his knees, then collapsed.

With the flames surrounding the cottage and his son lying on the ground, Hansen instinctively dove head first through the window. He rolled down the hill to extinguish the flames that were burning him.

“Kurtis is the hero in all this,” Karl Hansen recalled recently. “I couldn’t have got out the window without Kurtis breaking it. My doctors said if I breathed in that crap for another few seconds, I would have passed out.”

I don’t know if it’s the personal connection, the inherently emotional nature of the event itself, or Wilton’s writing, but a few editors (including myself) had to take a break after reading the story.

| Blogosphere, Navel-gazing, Public transit, Radio, Video

Welcome Daybreak listeners

(or, at least, those who hear about a website in the morning and make a note to visit a half hour later)

In case you missed it, I was invited by CBC Daybreak to come in and give them an analysis of blog coverage of the federal election campaign (my super-secret project). I was originally supposed to go on yesterday, but with the debate going long I was bumped to today.

Unfortunately, in the first time in months (years?) that I’ve taken a metro train during morning rush hour, I experienced four separate delays (one of which had me stuck in the tunnel). I practically had a heart attack, knowing full well that radio deadlines aren’t flexible by even a second.

I gave up at Laurier metro as the lights went out in the train, and hurried outside to let the producer know I wasn’t there. They quickly decided to do the interview by (pay)phone. (One thing payphones still have over cellphones is that, because they don’t have to compress their data into compact wireless streams, the sound is much clearer and more radio-friendly. Not as good as in-studio, but desperate times…)

As I told host Mike Finnerty, I don’t blame the STM for the delays, which were due in part to technical problems and because of the traffic tie-ups those problems create. But I wasn’t thrilled with the transit corporation this morning, that’s for sure. (And, of course, the trip back home was entirely uneventful)

Anyway, we talked about this blog (it’s really a place for any opinions I like to give on anything, though I focus specifically on the media, public transit, stuff going on in the news, blogs, and of course myself. You can also read what I’ve written about the federal election so far.

We also got into the meat of the matter (though six minutes goes by so fast when you’re talking about stuff), discussing blogosphere reaction to Elizabeth May in the debates, as well as a video by Justin Trudeau (and the parody of that video by Prenez Garde Aux Chiens, whose season premiere is tonight at 10pm on Canal Vox) that has been making the rounds in the blogosphere recently.

I’ll try to get a clip of the segment up soon.

| Montreal, Navel-gazing, Radio

Daybreak hosts debate in Papineau riding

CBC Daybreak (the radio morning show) is coming literally around the corner from my apartment later this morning, and hosting a live debate between candidates in the Papineau riding, including Liberal Justin Trudeau, starting just after 7am (88.5FM).

Rumour on the street is, after the debate (around 8:15 or so), (UPDATE: Bumped to tomorrow at 7:40 because the candidates couldn’t keep their mouths shut) they’ll be bringing in some know-it-all journalist wannabe to talk about blogs or something.

Worth getting up early for… (again).

UPDATE: Daybreak has the debate up as a podcast (mp3).

| Blogosphere, Media, Navel-gazing

What are your favourite political blogs?

With the federal election under way, political blogs are heating up (and springing up) like never before. Every politician has an official blog (to say nothing about Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and other Web 2.0 silliness), and every media outlet has some form of an “on the campaign trail” blog. (The Globe alone has eight election blogs)

Here are some of the ones that have peaked piqued my interest so far:

  • La campagne vue par Marissal et Pratte (just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?), a strange blog in which La Presse columnist Vincent Marissal and “éditorialiste-en-chef” André Pratte discuss politics with each other. Each post is actually a dual post from each of them, asking each other questions and giving their thoughts on some issue. But it’s not a strict point-counterpoint.
  • Silver-Powers, from the Globe, however, is. A Liberal hack vs. a Tory hack. Both former assistants to politicians in their parties. But rather than just yell at each other or make fun of gaffes from the other’s leader, they inject some humour into their posts, and stick to debating the policy issues that set them apart.
  • Off the Fence from J. Kelly Nestruck (who went from the McGill Daily to the National Post to the Guardian to the Globe and Mail) has sentimental value for me. We go way back to that protest in 2001 against Canwest, a company we would both later work for.
  • Macleans’s Deux maudits anglais gets a mention here not just because it’s funny (and has provided me plenty of linklove), but because it’s one of the few anglo blogs focusing on Quebec.
  • Claude William Genest’s blog also gets a vote (he’s the Green candidate in Westmount), but only because his massive ego is so shameless it’s funny. (Though kudos on the website, it’s very well designed)
  • Ditto Garth Turner, whose blog essentially led to a party switch. Putting blog above party, that’s worth something. He continues the full, honest disclosure that got him in trouble in the first place, and separates his blog from other candidates’ press-release feeds. (Though every time he mentions Stéphane Dion I ask myself: Really? You’re really excited about this guy as prime minister?)
  • Liblogs.ca is a blog aggregator, which is pretty good at finding interesting blog posts from small blogs from a Liberal perspective.

I’m subscribed to quite a few more, and I’m sure I’ll discover more gems as the election goes along.

What are your favourite federal political blogs? Bonus points if they’re francophone and/or Quebec-based. Extra bonus points if they go beyond ultra-partisanship, actually discuss new ideas instead of linking to newspaper articles and popular posts on other blogs, and won’t put me into a coma.

(This is all for a super-duper-secret project that I’ll let you in on next week)

| Business, Media, Montreal, My articles

New Monday Gazette (with TWIMy goodness)

New Monday Gazette front (Sept. 8, 2008)

New Monday Gazette front (Sept. 8, 2008)

The four of you who still read paper newspapers will notice a dramatic shift in Monday’s Gazette. It’s gotten smaller.

The most dramatic change is the consolidation of the news, Your Business and Arts & Life sections into the A section, similar to what happens in the Sunday paper. The Sports section is unchanged (in fact, it’s a larger-than-normal 10 pages this week), as is the ad-generating Driving section. The length of the paper reduces overall by about six pages.

Editor-in-Chief Andrew Phillips is honest in his note to readers today about why this is happening:

The main reason for the change is that the cost of newsprint is rising dramatically. In the past year, it has gone up by about 24 per cent, and it is adding more than $2 million to our annual expenses. Fuel costs, as everyone knows, have also gone up sharply.

The fact is we can’t keep printing the same size newspaper at a time when the competition for advertising revenue (which makes up about three-quarters of our income) is much tougher. The time is long past when newspapers like The Gazette could just absorb extra costs and pass all of them on to advertisers.

Of course, no doubt some readers won’t agree (especially when it’s combined with a slight increase in subscription rates), so Andrew and the rest of the staff are fully ready for an onslaught of complaints. He has a blog post explaining the situation, and readers are encouraged to comment there, or by email to his address or the new monday@thegazette.canwest.com.

As if in answer to management’s prayers to give them some cover fire, the New York Times also announced that it would be consolidating sections to save on newsprint. One of my colleagues got the idea to run a story about that in the Your Business section today, and Andrew points that out to readers.

(UPDATE Sept. 11: Andrew has a summary of the reaction, which is negative, but not as bad as he feared)

Here’s what’s changed

The new layout of A1 (as seen above) emphasizes the newspaper’s slew of Monday columnists (because, try as they might, little news happens on Sundays), with quotes along the side from marquee names.

Content-wise, the changes are modest:

  • Your Business takes the biggest hit, dropping to only three pages (1.5 if you discount the ads). This essentially means there will be one entrepreneurial feature story instead of two. Don Macdonald’s and Paul Delean’s columns are still there. It will also no longer be able to take advantage of the occasional extra page that pops up at the last minute when obituaries are light.
  • Editorial and Opinion pages are, for the first time, combined into a single page, with an opinion piece along the bottom, a single editorial and fewer letters. Monday opinion pages tend to be a bit stale sometimes because they’re created on the Friday before (along with Saturday and Sunday pages).
  • Arts & Life is reduced in size (and fewer pages are in colour), but no regular features are cut (the HealthWatch column moves to Tuesdays). Green Life, Showbiz Chez Nous, Dating Girl, Susan Schwartz (though she’s off this week), Hugh Anderson’s Seniors column, Applause, This Week’s Child, Fine Tuning (with the TV grid) are all still there.
  • Squeaky Wheels moves off of A2 to make way for the Bluffer’s Guide and the new Monday calendar.

It’s not all bad

On the plus side (and so people can get excited about something), two new features are being introduced on Mondays. A2 features a weekly look-ahead calendar, with information on events to look forward to. There’s also a Monday Closeup, which features an interview with someone who will be relevant to something happening that week. (The first week features an author talking about winning book awards, as the Man Booker shortlist is being announced)

But let’s get back to talking about me

Now here’s where I fit in: I’m the one putting together that look-ahead calendar. So if you know of any interesting newsworthy events coming up, let me know and I’ll see if I can get it in. Take a look at what’s already in the calendar to see what kind of stuff I’m talking about.

Note that the following are not things that will make it into the calendar:

  • Your birthday party
  • Your awesome rock/blues/polka band playing at Sala Rossa.
  • Your garage/bake/charity sale
  • Your book reading
  • Your support group meetup
  • Your $500 basket-weaving training course
  • Your company’s new advertising campaign launch
  • Any of the above replacing “your” with “your friend’s”

I mean, unless it’s really exceptional. Like you’re pulling a plane or something.

| Navel-gazing

Farked.

I admit, I’m pretty vain when it comes to my blog. I don’t advertise it or spend hours obsessing over search engine optimization. I don’t use Feedburner (yet) or Google Analytics to obsessively pry into my readership. But I take a look at my server logs and I’m pretty curious who comes here.

My traffic is a modest 1,000-2,000 visits a day, 20,000-30,000 unique visitors a month. For a locally-focused blog, I guess that’s pretty good (so everyone keeps telling me), though it’s nowhere near the readership of even a tiny local newspaper.

Whenever I start thinking I’m all that, though, I usually get a good swift kick in the pants when someone much more popular links to me. A single link from Patrick Lagacé, for example, can easily double my traffic on a given day. MtlCityWeblog also ranks highly in terms of incoming links.

And then there’s Fark.

Fark is like Slashdot (for whom the “Slashdot Effect” is named). Small-time web hosts fear these popular websites because of the insane spike in traffic they are reported to provide.

So you can imagine my concern when I saw that a bunch of people were coming here from Fark.com. It turns out a thread had been posted there linking to my recent CRTC roundup featuring the new Canadian porn channel. That thread then made it to the main page, which resulted in thousands of web surfers being directed here.

Thousands, but not hundreds of thousands or even tens of thousands. My statistics show only 7,000 people clicking through to the page (Fark’s counter is above 8,700). Turns out that’s about average. Some popular ones might see 15,000, and those promising pictures or other goodies might go up to 70,000. But barring some “epic thread” it doesn’t go much beyond that.

Perhaps Fark isn’t as popular as it once was. Perhaps with the Internet as huge as it is, there are fewer large gathering places with the power of God behind them.

Oh, and to save you some time, here are the thread’s highlights:

  • Rita MacKneels
  • The Great White Load
  • Roll Up the Rimjob
  • Edmund Fits Gerald
  • 2 Girls 1 Puck
  • Montreal Triple Expos
  • Summer of 69
  • The Littlest Homo

There, I just saved you 20 minutes.

In related news, my blog hit its 200th Google Reader subscriber recently. It kind of gets me that I have more blog subscribers than Facebook friends. Added to subscribers through other feed readers (Bloglines, Newsgator, Netvibes, Livejournal — in that order), the number comes up to somewhere between 270 and 282.

And that doesn’t include people who read the blog the old-fashioned way.

Now how do I cash in on this new-found fame? Where are those groupies they always tell me about?

| Media, Navel-gazing, Opinion

Don’t mess with the readers

A couple of weeks ago, the faxes at the Gazette were more active than usual. A letter came in, in ALL-CAPS RAGE format, which took issue with the paper’s decision to streamline the TV Times listings booklet that comes in Saturday’s paper:

WE ARE TERRIBLY DISAPPOINTED WITH YOUR CHANGES TO TV TIMES. THE MANNER YOU PROCEEDED WAS ARBITRARY, WITHOUT NOTICE NOR EXPLANATIONS.

YOU CANNOT CLAIM PAPER ECNOMY (sic) SINCE YOU HAVE WASTED NUMEROUS FULL AND PARTIAL PAGES OF SENSELESS GRAY FOR MANY YEARS. MORE TREES HAVE BEEN FELLED THAN TV TIMES WILL EVER REQUIRE.

SINCE THE DATA IS ALREADY DIGITIZED THERE IS NO ADDITIONAL LABOUR IN PRINTING THE INFORMATION.

YOU ARE CAUSING A SERIOUS DISSERVICE TO THE NIGHT VIEWERS SINCE THEY CANNOT PLAN THEIR VIEWING NIGHTS; THEY ARE TOTALLY IGNORANT OF THE PROGRAMMES AVAILABLE TO THEM.

IN ADDITION YOU ARE ROBBING THE SPONSORS OF THESE PROGRAMMES OF THE EXPECTED EXPOSURE OF THEIR PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. YOU ARE ALSO SHORTCHANGING US, YOUR READERS, OF AN ESSENTIAL INFORMATION THAT WE PAY FOR AND EXPECT.

WE SUGGEST THAT YOU USE YOUR EDITORIAL PAGE TO ADMIT YOUR ERROR AND APOLOGIZIE (sic) FOR THE INCONVENIENCE YOU HAVE CAUSED BY YOUR UNTIMELY DECISION.

SINCERELY YOURS,

ASSIDUOUS TV TIMES NIGHT READERS

The fax (who uses faxes anymore, anyway?) was followed by others, hand-written like they were ransom notes:

IT WASN’T BROKE

WHY SCREW IT UP?

TV TIMES IS A MESS

FIX IT RIGHT LIKE IT WAS

and

SNAFU

TV TIMES IS SCREWED UP

FIX IT RIGHT

Those faxes were resent at a rate of one a minute for over an hour before the faxes were shut off to avoid wasting any more paper. Over 50 faxes that powers that be will never see (unless they read this blog), and which won’t change anything.

But it served as a reminder that despite all the times I hear “I don’t read The Gazette” when I talk to people my age about it, there are plenty of people in an older age group who take the paper very seriously (and think their news judgment is vastly superior to everyone else’s).

Another reminder came as I started hearing (and reading) comments from readers who heard about the paper’s plans to make the Monday paper “more compact” like Sunday’s through a survey the paper commissioned. They’re almost universally opposed to the idea, and most took the time to complain that the Sunday paper needed to be fixed by adding more content and splitting up the sections again (currently it’s in two sections, the second being sports and classified).

The Gazette is also considering cutting the width of the paper by 2.5 inches, in order to make it more convenient to use as well as to save money on newsprint. (Considering how much I read the paper on public transit, any size reduction – provided the content stays the same – is welcome in my book).

A lot of people think they have better ideas on how to spend the paper’s money. More sports, less sports, more analysis, less analysis, longer articles, shorter articles, more hard news, more lifestyle features. Others simply demand the paper spend more money until it goes bankrupt.

I’m just glad they care.

| Montreal, My articles, Sports

TWIM: Scientology, the NFL and other threats to our existence

A double dose from yours truly today:

This week’s Justify Your Existence is an interview with a member of Anonymous, the anti-Scientology group. Though she’s unnamed, you’ll recognize her as the same young woman I made fun of talked about earlier when a video was posted on YouTube in which she said Scientology conspired to get her fired from her job. Though I suggested she was weird, to her credit, she was willing to sit down with me and explain herself. Reaction on their forums is starting to build here.

There’s also a protest today at 11 near Lafontaine Park, for anyone interested.

UPDATE: For those of you who are reading this article because it was posted on the Anonymous forums and have never read it before, Justify Your Existence by its very nature takes a tough stand against its interview subjects — part of the reason it’s tough getting interviews sometimes.

Also, from the Enterbulation forums:

NO WAY!!!!
His name is Steve Fagay?????

Actually, no it’s not. But I’m touched by the maturity.

Finally, I’ve already got hate mail. Sweet.

NFL vs. CFL

This week’s Bluffer’s Guide is about the Buffalo Bills game in Toronto this week, and what the NFL testing the waters in Canada could mean for our national football game. There’s suggestion that the Bills might move to Toronto after its current owner dies and the franchise is sold off. Such a move, worryers say, would spell the end to the Toronto Argonauts, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and probably even the CFL itself.

It comes the same day as this piece from The Gazette’s Herb Zurkowsky, quoting league officials worried about the NFL threat. He also has some interesting history in his notes that I wish I’d stolen from is useful for context.

UPDATE (Aug. 21): A reader points out that other NFL games have taken place on Canadian soil. This will be the first time that regular-season games take place in Canada, however.

| Navel-gazing, Sports

G to the S to the B

That’s more like it.

I was doing the Olympics pages last night, and there was a story from Cam Cole of the Vancouver Sun about how the American journalists are starting to make fun of us for not having won any medals.

Just before midnight came word that a Canadian wrestler had reached a final and would be guaranteed at least a silver medal, so the piece needed a significant rewrite.

UPDATE: This New York Times story looks like it was similarly rewritten on deadline. It points out that Canwest News Service has 28 journalists in Beijing, and our medal-to-journalist ratio looks almost as bad as our medal-to-athlete ratio.

| Media, Navel-gazing

Great Scot

I make fun of media mistakes, so I guess it’s fair play that I point out one of my own.

Last week, while putting together sports pages for Sunday, I selected a nice photo of Rafael Nadal throwing a wristband into the crowd at the Rogers Cup in Toronto as the cover art. He had just reached the men’s singles final (a match he would, of course, win) by defeating another player.

In the caption below the photo, there was a reference to that player being from the U.K., so I changed “U.K.” to “England” to fit the paper’s style guide.

Unfortunately, that player was Andy Murray, who I would learn from a few sources (including a particularly offended coworker) is Scottish, not English.

It’s bad enough when you learn you’ve made a mistake. Worse when it results in a correction, and horrifying when it results in an editor’s note. But when you have to read a letter to the editor correcting one of your mistakes, that hurts.

I will, of course, be posting a letter of formal apology to Scotland’s president at 10 Downing Street in Belfast post-haste.

UPDATE (Aug. 4): My attempt at penance as a headline-writer.

| Blogosphere, Media, Navel-gazing, Opinion

Nobody wants to read 1,000 comments

Patrick Lagacé brought up a point about comments on blogs, and how he’s not entirely sure what good they do him. Being a popular blog, it gets a lot of trolls and other pointless and unhelpful commentary. Comments easily reach into the dozens, sometimes hundreds.

That was also the subject of an interview Pat did on CIBL with Michel Dumais (Mario Asselin has the details) in which Pat totally name-drops me (near the end of the audio clip):

Dumais: … Vous êtes très fréquenté, vous générez beaucoup de commentaires. Mais ça serait pas intéressant pour vous peut-être de commencer à fréquenter aussi des autres blogues et à laisser des commentaires? …

Lagacé: Oui, j’essai de faire un peu. En fait le seul blogue ou je le fait, j’estime que c’est le meilleur blogue de couverture médiatique à Montréal, c’est le blogue de Steve Faguaiylle … Faguy… son blogue c’est Fagstein — qui couvre les médias montréalais, surtout anglo, mais un peu québecois… francophone aussi. C’est le seul ou je vais. Les autres, je sais pas. Un peu de manque de temps, un peu de manque d’intérêt.

(If my blog were a movie, that quote would go at the top of the poster.)

Although the number of comments on Pat’s blog causes a bit of professional jealousy on my part (second only to hair jealousy), it’s very rare that I’ll read the comments attached to one of his posts. Not so much because of the trolling (though it is apparent), but because there’s just so darn many of them. I don’t have time to read all the posts on blogs I’m subscribed to as it is. I certainly don’t have time to read 50 comments attached to each post, especially when they don’t have anything interesting to add.

And then there’s situations when the number of comments simply gets out of hand. The decapitation-on-a-bus story I talked about earlier now has 1,700 comments, most of which are repetitive. Has anyone read them all?

One easy solution is to stop approving troll comments. We set minimum limits (usually legal ones) for the types of comments we approve in moderation, but why set the barrier so low? Why not set them to the same level as we do letters to the editor? Just because there is space for more doesn’t mean we should bury any truly interesting comments in a pile of useless junk.

But even then, the number of comments can still be unbearable in very popular blogs or news stories or anywhere else one might have an attached discussion forum. When that happens, it’s time to start removing comments that aren’t really interesting (comments that simply agree, disagree, approve, disapprove, or otherwise give a comment without explaining it or adding anything new, as well as those that repeat things already said by others).

The standard response to that is: That’s censorship. It’s not though, it’s moderation. Nobody’s stopping you from posting your useless comments about my blog post on your blog or on some other forum somewhere. When I disapprove a comment it’s because I find it of no use to my readership.

But some still think that’s too far. So is there another method to get these runaway comments under control?

Well, Slashdot answered that question years ago with its comment system. The website, whose format looks very similar to blogs even though it predates them, has a threaded comment system, so comments can be traced back to their parents and sorted according to thread. This level of organization (and the ability to turn it on or off as needed) helps a big deal when dealing with a large number of comments.

More importantly, though, Slashdot has a peer moderation system that allows users to rate each others’ comments. Positive reviews increase a comment’s rating, and negative reviews decrease it. The result is that each comment is assigned a numerical rating (from -1 to +5), and readers can filter comments based on that rating. Set it to zero to get rid of just the trolls. Set it to +5 to get only the dozen or so truly exceptional or interesting or useful comments you need.

I’m surprised that every large-scale blogging system ever made hasn’t copied this system in some way. Instead, you see unthreaded comments with no rating system. The only judgment made is whether they meet the minimum requirements for posting, and that’s not good enough when our attention is so limited.

My blog, though it gets quite a few comments, doesn’t get near enough to start implementing stricter screening or peer moderation, but if I had 500 comments a day, I would certainly seriously consider it.

| Blogosphere, Montreal, My articles

TWIM: Blogging for dollars

This week, I talk about a local blogger, Stephen David Wark, who is participating in a Blogathon today (9am Saturday to 9am Sunday) to raise money for the Autism Clinic at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. He’s already started blogging, and will continue to post every half hour until 9am tomorrow. (And you better bet he blogged about the article). So show him (and the children) some love.

UPDATE: The article has apparently gotten people interested and donating, and he’s already raised more money than last year. I’ll go ahead and take credit for that.